Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has transcended
its era and become a landmark of popular culture.
Keep watching to discover the bizarre truth behind this classic of gothic horror.
For his model of sinister duality, Stevenson looked to the life of Deacon William Brodie.
A respected city councilman and carpenter, Brodie walked the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland
as a paragon of mid-18th century virtue.
A skilled craftsman, he was the head of the trade guild The Incorporation of Wrights and
Masons.
He made his living as a cabinetmaker and locksmith, crafting keys and repairing locks and doors
for the city's wealthy and elite.
But behind Brodie's facade of genteel respectability lurked a craven criminal.
His secret penchant for late-night drinking, gambling, and cockfighting in an unsavory
tavern in Edinburgh's Fleshmarket Close led to his secret life as the leader of a gang
of burglars.
Using duplicate keys and his skills as a locksmith, he could enter any home or business unfettered,
leaving behind no trace of entry.
His luck eventually ran out, though, when he was implicated in an audacious attempted
armed robbery of Edinburgh's Excise Office.
Sentenced to death, his trial lasted a mere 21 hours.
He was hanged in front of a crowd of 40,000 spectators.
Stevenson would go on to find even more fertile dramatic ground in Brodie's sordid tale.
With the help of his friend W.E.
Henley, he wrote a play based on the diabolical deacon's life.
Although that production ultimately failed, it sowed the seeds for the novella.
Ever since he was a child, Robert Louis Stevenson had vivid nightmares.
He was an invalid from birth who suffered from a malady termed "weak lungs," which was
later identified as tuberculosis, though that was probably a misdiagnosis.
So he spent much of his early years bedridden, which led to him developing a love of books
and a rich imaginative life.
It would be this fusion of chronic illness and dreams that fueled the writing of Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In the autumn of 1885, while suffering from a lung hemorrhage, a feverish and heavily
medicated Stevenson screamed out in his sleep.
His wife Fanny stirred him awake.
But he was not at all grateful for his wife's intervention.
According to Graham Balfour's biography The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, he said,
"Why did you wake me?
I was dreaming a fine bogey tale."
Apparently, he had been dreaming about Jekyll's first transformation into Mr. Hyde.
Fanny Stevenson was her husband's most ardent supporter and also occasionally his most brutal
critic.
Despite his enthusiasm for his new novella, she felt that such a lurid tale was beneath
his talents.
In a letter to Stevenson's friend and occasional literary partner W.E.
Henley discovered in 2000, Fanny decried the first draft as, quote, "a quire full of utter
nonsense."
She also threatened to burn it.
She was herself a skilled poet and writer of short stories and pulled no punches when
it came to her husband's writing.
She considered Jekyll and Hyde "distasteful" and devoid of thematic weight.
Stevenson, who valued Fanny's judgment as an editor above all, knew that she was right
in her assessment of Jekyll and Hyde.
He'd written the novella as a simple narrative.
The first draft was missing the allegorical elements that elevated it from a mere horror
story into one of the greatest stories of all time.
According to one of the many legends surrounding its composition, Stevenson burned the original
manuscript.
Or perhaps it was Fanny, as the Henley letter seems to indicate.
With Fanny's assessment of his work in mind, her husband went back to work, completing
a second draft in a mere three days.
Much of the creation of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is shrouded in hyperbole,
myth-making, and unverifiable conjecture on the part of literary critics and scholars.
The most persistent story is that of the novella's preternaturally rapid composition.
The commonly held belief is that the total time of composition for both the lost initial
draft and the final version was a mere six days.
But that is, at best, questionable.
It's generally accepted that it was written and revised very rapidly, but more likely
on the order of six weeks.
The three-day time frame would seem to come wholly from the recollection of Stevenson's
stepson, Lloyd Osbourne.
He's quoted in Graham Balfour's biography The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson as saying,
"I don't believe that there was ever such a literary feat before as the writing of Dr
Jekyll.
I remember the first reading as though it were yesterday.
Louis came downstairs in a fever; read nearly half the book aloud; and then, while we were
still gasping, he was away again, and busy writing.
I doubt if the first draft took so long as three days."
But Balfour questions the three days-per-draft narrative, as he wrote,
"Of course, it must not be supposed that these three days represent all the time that Stevenson
spent upon the story, for after this he was working hard for a month or six weeks in bringing
it into its present form."
The most misunderstood aspect of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the dynamic
between Jekyll and his monstrous alter ego.
A century-plus of various adaptations have cast the pair as two completely distinct personalities:
one representing absolute virtue and good, the other abject depravity and evil.
But this popular simplification conflicts with Stevenson's original intent.
For really, there is no Mr. Hyde.
"Man is not truly one, but truly two."
While innumerable adaptations would have us believe that Jekyll's creation of Hyde is
a consequence of disrupting the natural order, Hyde is in fact his intended result.
Henry Jekyll is no squeaky-clean servant of science bent on eradicating evil from the
human condition.
Rather, he's an aging and highly repressed man of the Victorian upper class desperate
to indulge his prurient desires free of guilt and consequence.
In effect, Edward Hyde is a chemically induced disguise.
It's clear in the text that Jekyll remains the dominant personality, always thinking
of himself as Jekyll even while disguised as Hyde.
The doctor recalls his actions as Hyde using the pronoun "I," not "he," despite his claim
that the brute is a separate entity with motivations all his own.
Most tellingly, the final chapter, titled "Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case,"
is written by Jekyll while inhabiting the form of Hyde.
The themes of duality and hidden self in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde do not only
apply to the main character.
They also function as a pointed critique of Victorian class roles and morality.
The London of Jekyll and Hyde is a city divided by class, in effect fractured along the same
line as the Jekyll/Hyde persona.
Like Jekyll, the city is a bastion of intellectualism, education, and wealth.
Edward Hyde, meanwhile, is undoubtedly a denizen of the Soho district, which is marked by poverty,
filth, and crime.
Never losing sight of the fact that Jekyll is Hyde, Stevenson skillfully exploits Victorian
social fears, revealing that crime, corruption, and depravity also exist among the elite.
"We've all had thoughts that we didn't want published or shouted out loud.
We certainly have had desires that are not confined to a drawing room."
Stevenson's overarching critique of Victorian society lies in his assertion that the era's
morality, marked by a suppression of natural human impulses and hiding the undesirable,
was utterly destructive to both individuals and society at large.
"Gentlemen like me have to be very careful of what they do and say."
As interpreted by Victorian audiences, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a warning
against the dangers of the libido unleashed, and this reading immediately influenced subsequent
adaptations.
Although Stevenson leaves the specifics of Jekyll and Hyde's vices largely to the reader's
imagination, he balked at the libidinous interpretation assigned to his work.
In a private letter that he wrote to New York Sun editor John Paul Bocock in 1887 regarding
a popular stage adaptation of his book, he declared,
"[Hyde] was not good-looking...and not, Great Gods! a mere voluptuary.
There is no harm in voluptuaries; and none, with my hand on my heart and in the sight
of God, none, no harm whatsoever in what prurient fools call 'immorality'...People are so filled
full of folly and inverted lust, that they think of nothing but sexuality."
Still, Stevenson's narrative continues to lend itself to a number of interpretations
like these.
This ranges from the broad interpretation of the novel as a statement on repression
in general to the more narrow analysis of its subtext of duality as a gay metaphor.
Regardless of interpretation, the story's anticipation of Freudian psychology is undeniable,
with the concepts of id, ego, and superego clearly illustrated by the Jekyll/Hyde schism.
If you believe that the doctor's name rhymes with "speckle," you're one of the millions
of people who've been pronouncing one of literature's most iconic characters incorrectly.
As it turns out, the proper way to say this Scottish surname is really "JEE-kul."
Stevenson borrowed the name from his good friend, famed British horticulturist Gertrude
Jekyll.
Common conjecture states that the choice of this name that rhymes with "seek all" is a
clever bit of wordplay intended to complement the name "Hyde," so that it means "hide and
seek."
In all likelihood, we have American actor Spencer Tracy to thank for the common mispronunciation.
He starred as Jekyll and Hyde in the popular 1941 MGM film adaptation directed by Victor
Fleming.
That movie used the "Jeck-ul" pronunciation, and it's since stuck.
"Dr. Jekyll, that frightful maniac broke into the house."
Ironically, Fleming's film is a direct remake of a 1931 adaptation starring Fredric March
in the title role, and March uses Stevenson's preferred pronunciation throughout the film.
"How do you do, Dr. Jekyll?"
"How do you do?"
In the late summer and autumn of 1888, London's Whitechapel district was gripped by a series
of brutal killings.
The culprit, dubbed Jack the Ripper, struck without warning or motive, leaving few clues
in his bloody wake.
He seemed like a real-life Jekyll and Hyde, a comparison not lost on Victorian Londoners.
The contemporary press even often referred to him as "Mr. Hyde."
In August 1888, the month after the first Ripper killing, actor Richard Mansfield took
to the London stage in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The play was an instant hit, with audiences and critics especially praising Mansfield's
rendition of Hyde.
Distorting his features through stage lighting, he made his terrifying change in plain view
of the audience.
So complete was his transformation that rumors swirled among theatergoers.
On October 5, 1888, Scotland Yard received a letter claiming that Mansfield was Jack
the Ripper.
He was never charged with the crimes, though.
Instead, he went on to even greater acting success, eventually playing Jekyll and Hyde
on Broadway.
From stage plays to comic books, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the most
adapted works in literature history.
The movies have had a special fascination with Stevenson's tale, dating back to the
inception of the medium.
According to the Robert Louis Stevenson Archive, in the silent era, 23 versions were produced
before 1925, with a total of six made in 1920 alone.
Of the silent adaptations, the best is without a doubt the 1920 version directed by John
S. Robertson, which stars John Barrymore in the dual role.
And F.W. Murnau, best remembered for 1922's Nosferatu, also adapted the novel into a film
in 1920.
This version retains Stevenson's plot but changes the characters' names.
Arguably the greatest Jekyll and Hyde film is MGM's definitive 1931 version directed
by Rouben Mamoulian.
Starring Fredric March, the film is especially memorable for its grotesque interpretation
of Hyde realized through the artistry of makeup pioneer Wally Westmore.
In recent decades, Jekyll and Hyde has been subject to cinematic treatment ranging from
the serious to the just plain weird.
Some notables include a Blaxploitation version in 1976 called Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde and a dreadful
1982 parody called Jekyll and Hyde...Together Again that features Hyde as a party animal.
Appropriately enough, that one ends with Robert Louis Stevenson rolling over in his grave.
"Experimental Formula 143: botched completely."
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